Rose prepares for bust-up in name of justice

Wednesday 6 May 2009 08:24 BST

Rose prepares for bust-up in name of justice

Marks & Spencer's recent better-than-expected sales figures must have left Sir Stuart Rose hoping he had tamed investors' anger in time for July's AGM. But any chance of a return to the Sir Stuart love-in of years gone by has taken a knock with yesterday's news that campaigners will be taking their ongoing fight against M&S's "tit tax" on bigger bras to the top. One of the founders of facebook group, Busts 4 Justice, Beckie Williams, has bought a share in M&S to ask Sir Stuart himself to drop the £2 charge on bras above a DD cup. So not only will he face the wrath of institutional investors over his dual chairman and chief executive role, he'll also have amply endowed women venting their fury. So what sparked their renewed anger? Williams was accidentally sent an email last month by head of product PR, Tania Littlehales, which effectively claimed the retailer could not afford to drop the charge. In the email, intended for a colleague, she wrote: "We aren't changing prices, especially in this climate." She then suggested offering a one-off discount to the group's members. When quizzed, Littlehales said that the discount was a goodwill gesture. Hmmm. It looks to City Spy suspiciously like a bribe to get them to go away

* PR students have been looking at the M&S bra charge in their crisis management paper as a lesson in how the internet can be used to draw attention to an issue. Williams now suggests they use it as a case study in a "how not to handle customer complaints" module.

* Well done to Charles Drayson, who has set up a solicitors' firm, The Contracts Team, with an innovative billing system. He eschews hourly rates, which are the norm in his profession. "It's still done on hourly rates, so the longer it takes, the more you pay," he says. "You could say that rewards inefficiency. You don't often know at the beginning of a project what the bill will end up being: is it for 20 hours, 30 hours?"

Could it be nuts to sell in May?

Sell in May? The rally in these first couple of trading days of the month has seen the FTSE 100 close to hitting its highest levels of the year. The FTSE 250, unencumbered by all those bombed-out global commodities and oil stocks and thus a better barometer of UK Plc, is already trading at a 2009 peak and is currently at its highest since before the collapse of Lehman. Green shoots anyone?

* But you think the recession could be easing in America? Er, not quite. A Texas bank has decided to demolish a batch of nearly finished houses in one formerly upmarket suburb, rather than complete the development. Guaranty Bank of Austin worked out the $1 million or so it would cost to complete the executive homes would be impossible to recoup in the current housing market. Meanwhile, it faced escalating city fines as vandals and squatters were taking over the unsold properties, leaving behind graffiti and drug paraphernalia. Demolition — kindly filmed by recession voyeurs, and now available on YouTube — will cost a shade more than $100,000. It's not all waste, though. The wood will be pulped into mulch for landscaping.

It's not all thanks to the Yanks

Shadow Business Secretary Ken Clarke has cautioned against blaming America for our current economic woes.

"People believed that they were disposing of the risks by transferring them away from balance sheets, and that traditional risk management did not matter— that happened on both sides of the Atlantic," he says. "We have heard a lot about subprime mortgages, which were the first symptom, but this was not some funny version of swine flu that broke out in the Mid-West of America and spread. Nothing happened in the markets of New York that did not happen in the markets of London.

"In this country, 120% mortgages and mortgages for five times people's earnings were given — sometimes those earnings were self-certified.

We did not use the American jargon of subprime mortgages' here, but we did have the financial folly."

* Listings of firms collapsing into administration is never a happy read, but there has been a touch of comedy in some of the administrators' names in recent weeks. As seen in the London Gazette in the past few days: the hosting of a creditors' meeting by "N Price" (who it is to be hoped has a middle name beginning with "E"); the announcement of an administration by "I Best", at Ernst & Young (he must be a highly rated expert), and er, D L Cockshott, who must have had trouble in the playground at school.

Asset sale that was an also-ran

Administrators at Mountgrange were keenly anticipating a £1.5 million windfall from the sale of 22 racehorses that were for some inexplicable reason part of a property company's assets. (Here's a clue: company boss Martin Myers is a great racing buff).

The nags had a book value of £2.2 million, so the expected £1.5 million wasn't an unrealistic prospect. But the sale late on Friday raised a total of just 650,000 guineas. They were lucky to get that — racing industry professsionals were quietly surprised that the sale had done so well. However, that doesn't stop the administrators wondering why the horses were in the books at £2.2 million...

* There are 16 Ferrari dealerships in the UK. The new Ferrari California will retail at £150,000. Each of the 16 has a waiting list of at least 50 customers wanting the car. They've each paid non-returnable deposits of £25,000. Recession, what recession?

* The dispute between Hirco and Laxey Partners continues apace. The AIM-listed property developer, run by the wealthy Hiranandani family, is holding its shareholders' meeting today in Zurich to vote on the activist investor's demands to restructure the board.

The choice of Zurich is interesting. It just so happens that Laxey boss Colin Kingsnorth and some of his colleagues are on the wrong end of an investigation by the Swiss federal authorities into alleged secret stakebuilding, using derivatives, in Implenia, the country's biggest building services group. Under Swiss law, holdings in derivatives are subject to the same rules of disclosure as normal shares and there has been speculation that Laxey, which denies any transgression, could face criminal prosecution. Laxey has based its attack upon Hirco on its corporate governance credentials. Making that same argument in Switzerland, however, may prove awkward.